A great template website tool – inexpensive, easy to use – is GoDaddy’s Website Tonight. When my kids (bless them, following the family tradition!) wanted to put up their first site, we used WebSite Tonight rather than getting our programmer to do a site for us.

This is because the kid’s site is fairly basic and I also wanted them to start building their skillset in this area – plus have the satisfaction of ‘doing it themselves’.

If you’re just starting out in business online, or your company is fairly small, a template site like this will likely serve you just fine until you’re making enough money to have a full-capability site done in PHP. But that will be easy because then you can just tell your programmer to take your existing site and reproduce it in .php programming language.

WebSite Tonight also has some tools in place so you can enter in your tags and keywords for the search engines – this will get your website indexed properly by the search engines and over time will improve your search engine rankings (enabling people to find you more quickly and easily). Here’s how to do it:

- Login to your GoDaddy WebSite Tonight Control Panel

1/
Go to:  Settings –> Configuration

Description: Make sure the description contains your top keywords (i.e. what will people be typing into Google when they are looking for your information?)

Keywords: And then choose your top 5-7 keywords to put in the keyword box (these can also be phrases, like ‘dangers of wireless’) type each one clean (no quotation marks or anything) and then separate each with a comma. Don’t put in too many keywords or Google will think you’re spamming.

also click the box that says “Redirect all visitors to [your domain]”

2/
Go to: Manage –> Organize Site

For each page:

- click on the page to highlight it
- in the boxed area on the right hand side, Make sure the BROWSER TITLE describes that page’s contents in a way that contains your keywords. For example, the Browser Title for my kid’s homepage is: “Kids WiFi Radiation Dangers” rather than just saying “Home”
- check the box “Restore default navigation” at the bottom
- click on “OK”

- then do the same sequence for each page of your site. Try to title your different pages with different keywords or keyword phrases.

3/
Go to: Manage –> Google Sitemap

These settings tell Google how to view your site in terms of how often you update/change your content and also which pages are more important and contain the best information on your site.

Click on the little question marks next to the CHANGE FREQUENCY and PRIORITY headings for a full description of what to set as your parameters for each page of your site.

The important thing to keep in mind is that you need to give EACH of your pages a different ranking – you can’t rank all your pages as 1.0 as this will just result in your site prioritization getting ignored.

And that’s it! Of course, you can do much more to optimize your search engine indexing if you have a custom site (again, I recommend PHP, rather than html or asp since you can expand and configure it with the highest degree of flexibility). But until you have the time or the finances to have a custom-designed site done, GoDaddy’s tools for SEO on WebSite Tonight are pretty good for a template site.

Now that you’ve got your site configured properly, be sure and check out my other blog post on How To Get Good Search Engine Rankings for more useful tips and tricks I’ve learned in my decade online.

soar higher,

Jini

David Ogilvy was one of the first big advertising guys to prove that storytelling (a full page worth of small-font text) sold extremely well.

When we think of story-based advertising, we often think of those mile-long internet sales letters, or slick ads in niche-market magazines. But these two examples show the unmatched power of storytelling even in art and flea market sales.

In this first example, Chris Tyrell tells a story about an artist who tested storytelling as a sales technique:

The artist I interviewed conducted an experiment by offering the same artwork (an etching) for sale on two different websites. She provided two dramatically different stories about the piece on each site: one story was extremely poignant while the other was mundane. The piece with the compelling emotional story attached to it sold for almost double the price of the same piece that was described in cool, unemotional and technical terms.

Chris goes on to provide other examples and the one that struck me most was an Ebay experiment, where a group took items purchased at thrift stores and flea markets and then put them up for sale on Ebay… with a good story attached.

What they discovered was that $128 worth of second-hand purchases netted them $3600 on Ebay – simply by attaching a story to each piece. Here’s an example of what they did…

The took this wooden animal figure,  purchased for 75 cents at a thrift store:

When they listed it along with this story on Ebay, it sold for $108.50!!

I must say, they also made sure that the photos of each object were good ones – presentation helps!

So how can you work more storytelling into your business, products, or service?

So many people are hesitant to tell their personal stories – either thinking they’re not that interesting, not wanting to boast, or simply not feeling comfortable sharing their private details. So if you can’t tell your own stories, find other ones to tell. Or tell a story about something you read or heard about. As long as it’s interesting, or moving, that’s all you need.

soar higher,

Jini

As the Internet and email become (or already are!) a primary method of communication, corporate and political lobbying groups are getting VERY smart in using tactics to misinform and manipulate people.

Here is a great example of this: This email was spread virally among friends of an older age group. You can see how it’s specifically written to target the baby-boomer generation:

“SUBJECT: To think we can change the earth

For all of you out there across the globe who have fought so hard to tackle the hideous enemy of our planet, namely carbon emissions, that bogus god you worship named “Climate Change” or “Global Warming”,  there is some really bad news that will be very painful for you to process.

The current volcanic eruption going on in Iceland, since it first started spewing volcanic ash, has, to this point, NEGATED EVERY SINGLE EFFORT you have made in the past five years to control CO2 emissions on our planet.  Not only that, this single act of God has added emissions to the earth estimated to be 42 times more than can be corrected by the extreme human regulations proposed for annual reductions.

It’s very disheartening to realize that all of the carbon emission savings you have accomplished while suffering the inconvenience and expense of driving Prius hybrids, buying fabric grocery bags, sitting up til midnight to finish your kid’s “The Green Revolution” science project, throwing out all of your non-green cleaning supplies, using only two squares of toilet paper, putting a brick in your toilet tank reservoir, selling your Landcruiser and speedboat, going on vacation to a city park instead of overseas, nearly getting hit every day on your bicycle, replacing all of your $1 light bulbs with $10 light bulbs …well, all of those things you have done have all gone down the tubes in just the past week. The volcanic ash emitted into the Earth’s atmosphere in the past weeks has totally erased every single effort you have made to reduce the evil beast carbon.  And, those thousands of jobs you helped move to Asia with expensive emissions demands on businesses…you know, the ones that are creating even more emissions than when they were creating our jobs, well that must seem really worthwhile now. And I do wish that there was some kind of silver lining to this volcanic ash cloud but the fact of the matter is that the bush fire season across the western U.S.A. will start in about 2 months and those fires will negate your efforts to reduce carbon emissions in our world for the next 2 years.

So, grab a beer, give the world a hug, and have nice day!”

Did you know that oil companies pay people to write these viral emails and then send them communities like your friends? They prefer this kind of political communication because it can’t be traced to source, which enables them to tell enormous lies without consequences – this email is a perfect example.

In reality: the volcano actually CUT global emissions because the planes it grounded for just a few days would have emitted FAR more CO2 than the volcano. Google it yourself, look for a credible source, don’t trust corporate-schmuck propaganda! These greedy-guts want to screw your grandchildren for their own profit – don’t be their tool!!

Here’s some folks who are willing to be public and source their claims:

This environmental blog says grounded planes cut CO2 more than volcano increased it and provides the raw data they used to calculate:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/04/volcano-vs-planes-the-emission-equation.php

This site uses US government data to show that ALL volcanic emissions are less than 1% of human emissions:
http://www.grist.org/article/volcanoes-emit-more-co2-than-humans

We’ve all got to get a whole lot more savvy in this Internet-based world…… And we have to base our actions on REAL information, not propaganda. This is especially dominant in the healthcare field as drug companies scramble desperately to recoup falling profits as people switch to holistic medicine.